Invocation

by Carla Martin-Wood

Lady of secrets,
come forth!
Careless girl,
bearing the marks of
your dark addiction
like a badge --
licking your fingers,
your mouth blooming garnet
with the forbidden juice.

Come, shameless beauty,
trailing your bat-winged babies behind you!

Dance down the woodland,
laughing in your tattered gown,
feigning innocence once more!
We -- the guilty -- will believe you.

Consume our sanity entirely,
Lady of burning flowers!
Drape us with green and with garland.

Sweet, demented child --
lover of excess,
make us suffer
your eccentricities again.
Give us over once more
to this luscious tyranny of Spring.

How we crave
the honey and the madness!

Come, Persephone --
make your Mama smile!

---

Carla Martin-Wood delights in the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it is this that feeds her body, while Goblin Fruit feeds her imagination. Carla's newest chapbook, Garden of Regret, is available from Pudding House Publications, and another chapbook, Redheaded Stepchild, is forthcoming from Pudding House. She will have poems included in two anthologies, Love Poems and other Messages for Bruce Springsteen and Casting the Nines, both due for release in September. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been widely published in print and online in the US and Ireland. She is an in-house reader for Soundzine.

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